Colorado Town Sues State, Gov. Hickenlooper and COGA to Protect Right to Ban Fracking

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In a state wracked with clashes over its explosive expansion of fracking, residents of Lafayette, Colorado just outside Boulder, have filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to prevent the state of Colorado, Gov. John Hickenlooper and the Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA) from taking away the town’s right to ban the practice.

Many Colorado citizens want the right to decide for themselves whether drilling sites like this one should be allowed in their communities. Photo credit: The Endocrine Disruption Exchange

Citizens in Lafayette, which is a Home Rule Community under Colorado law, voted last November to pass a Community Bill of Rights under its Home Rule Charter that banned fracking and established the right of citizens to a healthy environment. In December COGA sued the city to overturn its Bill of Rights, claiming that while citizens don’t have a right to clean air and water or self-governance, COGA has a constitutional right to frack under the state’s Oil and Gas Act.

Citizens responded by filing a first-of-its-kind class action suit in June, arguing that parts of the Oil and Gas Act violate the right to local self-governance. The preliminary injunction, filed yesterday in the Boulder County District County, would prevent COGA’s lawsuit from moving forward until its own is decided and declare parts of the Oil and Gas Act unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs are part of the Colorado Community Rights Network, a group founded late last year to protect the rights of communities to make decisions locally on issues like fracking. They are represented by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a Pennsylvania-based group that provides affordable representation to communities clashing with deep-pockets corporations. CELDF executive director Thomas Linzey said of the Lafayette lawsuit:

The right to local, community self-government serves as the foundation for the American system of law. Yet the people’s right to self-governance has been routinely ignored by our elected representatives and overridden by the courts in favor of corporate rights. This class action lawsuit is merely the first of many by people across the United States whose constitutional rights to self-govern are routinely violated by state governments working in concert with the corporations that they ostensibly regulate. The people of Lafayette will not stand idly by as their rights are negotiated away by oil and gas corporations, and by their state government.

The lawsuit follows a recent deal between Gov. Hickenlooper and Colorado congressman Jared Polis to remove four contentious pro- and anti-fracking measures from this November’s state ballot in favor of an 18-member commission, with both citizens and oil and gas industry representatives, to work out an agreement on the issues to submit to the legislature for approval.

Many environmentalists took a dim view of this compromise, despite the likelihood that the industry would spend tens of millions of dollars to buy itself another ballot victory.

Comments

smja

This is a HUGE case with tremendous impact! Soon we will learn how far the constitutional rights of U.S.citizens to self determination can be eroded–or sold out– by their state’s politicians and courts. It will be very interesting to see what the judges here will do about the flagrant state/corporate partnership which operates to undermine & steamroll over the fundamental American principle & practice of Home Rule (just as it has already done with all the environmental protections of the Clean Air, Clean Water & Safe Drinking Water Acts).

TinaMc.

I was just having a conversation about the Halliburton loophole and that we really need to hold the congressional entities that voted for it accountable. They will not stop poisoning us until the loophole is closed. Meannwhile, a new effort is underway to stop the strengthening microscope on the damages that fracking is causing throughout the country. Governors from our energy-harvesting intensive states are worried that they may lose their power to regulate hydraulic fracturing. The group is called “States First” and is comprised of all the regular criminals seen here http://www.statesfirstinitiative.org/#!supporters/ciac. One there worries is the efforts that have been made over the past 5 years to close the Halliburton loophole via a bill entitled “Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals Act”. Unfortunately, the bill has had little support, but we can change that by changing the people we elect that are supposed to protect us, not their corporate sponsors. Come on Novermber!

VAppalachia1

Thank you so much for alerting readers about the States First Initiative. Waiting to see if Maryland’s Governor Martin O’Malley joins the rogues gallery. (www.vice.com/…/the-democratic-party-future-dark-money-fracking)

You described States First as “a new effort…to stop the strengthening microscope on the damages that fracking is causing throughout the country.” Here’s another part of that effort that the frackers are initiating: The American Petroleum Institute put out an RFP in August for their own industry-funded public health study. (I know this from a respected university researcher already studying these issues; the researcher’s school received the RFP.)

Seems troubling data is beginning to emerge as US academic institutions (i.e. the ones who still take seriously their objectivity) continue to study fracking’s effects on the health of communities. The industry until now has been able to hide behind the lack of data in order to continue its ongoing, for-profit experiment on the health of US citizens living on shale plays. Can’t have respected institutions actually proving that it’s harmful, so API must buy its own study.

Wonder which is cheaper to purchase: a study or a politician?

TinaMc.

I wonder, daily, what it must feel like to lie and knowingly poison people. And we are not talking a few liars. We are talking thousands of people. Landmen, politicians, CEOs, roughnecks, roustabouts, newpaper editors, t.v. stations, government employees, public radio stations, etc. I hope I live to see the day they are all put on trial.

VAppalachia1

Yea, verily. They keep lying as if repeated the lies might eventually make them turn into truth.

I witnessed the head of the Maryland Petroleum Council tell a legislative committee that the Cove Point LNG export facility vying for permits in our state would not be for moving fracked gas out of the Marcellus. Guess he’s confident these environmental committee members wouldn’t do a simple google search to learn that Cabot Energy has contracts with Cove Point and Sumitomo to ship gas fracked in northeast PA to Japan.

Who gets to call people out when they lie to a legislative body? If I had stood up and insisted on the truth, they probably would have removed me from the chamber.

My best wishes to citizens of Lafayette. I personally think It is criminal for a governor – one man – or any group of politicians or businessmen (oil companies) – to dictate to citizens how they must live. These companies come in and destroy the environment and leave messes behind. Citizens have a right to clean air and water. I wish I was rich or a brilliant lawyer so I could do more than be a cheerleader.

VAppalachia1

Hope you’ll keep an eye on Maryland, for more such “criminal” behavior. When Gov. Martin O’Malley’s Executive Order ends this fall, he (The State) will decide whether or not fracking poses unacceptable risk to the people and resources of Maryland. The Governor—who first seemed to be on the side of caution and compassion for communities on western Maryland’s Marcellus shale—has been planning a presidential run in 2016.

So guess where his recent fundraiser was held? In the DC offices of American’s Natural Gas Association (ANGA).

Please remember to follow candidate O’Malley’s actions in 2016 and vote your conscience if he destroys unspoiled Mountain Maryland by selling out to the shale gas industry.

Bev Mabry

if he does run you need to be vigilant and let everyone know what he stands for. I’m sick to death of seeing our lands decimated by oil companies, and, my understanding is that the fracking for gas along the front range of Colorado is not even for the benefit of Americans. they plan to export the gas – so it still does not meet American energy needs.

VAppalachia1

With you on all counts. Fracking in western Maryland would also ruin lives only to send gas to Europe and Asia, by way of a dangerous LNG export facility planned for a residential neighborhood on the Chesapeake Bay called Cove Point. People across Maryland are fighting to protect each other from this shale gas madness, but it remains to be seen if our “leaders” will sell us out for the promises of jobs and endless revenue.(https://www.facebook.com/notatcovepoint)

Though these sickening stories have been unfolding across our nation’s shale plays, Maryland may be the first state to delay and study fracking, and then choose to embrace fracking with eyes wide open about the resources and small rural communities it will devastate. Maryland’s studies are warning the state about this devastation. If Gov. O’Malley chooses this path, he will be one step lower on the ladder down to hell, because he could have said no, but sold out anyway.

thanks. I sure wish I had some way to help fight fracking. It will destroy this country for all eternity.

VAppalachia1

Thank you for caring; by speaking up you are helping. We all need to try to start a conversation with one new person a day, preferably not in the “preaching to the choir” arena. Family, friends, people in line at the grocery store…let’s tell the human story of fracking so that they understand that the expensive advertising and lobbying efforts of the gas industry are just that: efforts to put lipstick on a pig, and to turn policy makers into tools who are shameless enough to kiss the pig.

It took years for the broad public (and the mainstream media, so beholden to advertising dollars) to grasp that tobacco products are harmful, despite being glamorized by their corporate producers.

We should support universities still studying this mess with integrity and objectivity. We should stand with people telling the truth.

Maggie Schafer

BRAVO! It is time we start to rebel against these elected officials whoring to oil and gas! I live in Boulder and we will fight “Frackenlooper” and his oil and gas pimps! We have the right to stop the wholesale land grabs going on by oil and gas! NO MORE – WE HAVE EVEN TAKEN CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE TRAINING HERE and we will use it if we have to! Frackenlooper is a bully – governors do not sue their own citizens!

Wes_Scott

I salute all the comments so far regarding the need to take back control of our government. i have been preaching that message for 5 years. The ONLY way to change what is happening is to change the politicians that allow it to happen and replace them with politicians who are not bought and controlled by the oil and gas industry.

But, talk is cheap and once we have talked it we have done the easy part. Now, who will actually work to make it happen? How important is it, really, to you and your future? We ahve the Constitutional authority to change our government, but it will not happen unless we can get a lot mroe citizens on our side and actively involved.

Paul Kangas

NY Supreme Court rule in 2014 that a city has the right to ban fracking.
That ruling may apply in Colorado.
Germany banned fracking by first passing a solar payment policy that requires UTILITIES to pay home owners $0.29 kwh for solar they feed onto the grid.
May I suggest this idea is worth doing.
Germany now gets so much solar from homes that they don’t need gas.
Plus they shut down half their nukes.
By 2033 Germany will be 100% powered by solar, wind, hydro & bio.
Colorado gets 2111 KWh/ yr., 5X more sun than Germany.
Colorado is one of the solar richest states in the US.
Colorado could generate 100% of its total energy from the sun by 2033.
China makes top quality solar panels, that are now the cheapest in the world. It is like when Ford began making the cheapest cars in America.
We can buy out way out from under big oil, if each city has a solar payment policy.
Stand up! Fight back!.

Frackem

All the mineral owners should just not lease their lands to the companies. Then no drilling would happen.

If that doesn’t happen then the oil companies have the legal authority to come in and use as much of the surface as reasonably necessary.

Mineral estates are dominant over the surface estates also. The only way you can stop it is to make the mineral owners turn down the hundred thousand $$$ paycheck they will receive.

Or I could suggest that the environmental groups go out and buy all the minerals from the current landowners.

VAppalachia1

Greed is one of the seven deadly sins.

Pride is another.

Bev Mabry

what’s sad is that in many states the mineral rights were not sold with the land – that is true in the Denver area. I’m not sure but I think the mineral rights belong to the state. the big fight in Colorado is between cities and the state. most residents do not want fracking in their back yards and the governor apparently wants the revenue.